Madeline Zavodny

Madeline Zavodny is a professor of economics at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn. She was formerly an associate professor of economics at Occidental College and a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Her research on the economics of immigration has been published in the Journal of Labor Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, Demography, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Research in Labor Economics, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

About 8.5 million of the 11-plus million unauthorized immigrants living in the US are in the workforce, accounting for about 5 percent of all workers. Almost none of them want to be unauthorized—they either have no way to attain legal status, or the pathway to legal status is so onerous that they believe they are better off remaining unauthorized.

The real disappointment of President Obama’s executive action on immigration is that it distracts Congress and the American public from the far more important issue of the need to reform the entire US immigration system.

New estimates from the Pew Research Center suggest that the number of unauthorized immigrants is once again rising in the U.S. Although this turnaround from the sharp decline in the unauthorized population during the Great Recession is likely to be condemned by many, it’s actually good news.

Join the CEO of a national restaurant chain and a panel of immigration experts and advocates to discuss the latest research, the broader implications for the US economy, and what is at stake in the policy debate. This event is jointly sponsored by AEI and ImmigrationWorks USA.